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KARS, TURKEY—Like dozens of cities across Turkey, Kars is a mix of the traditional and modern. On the town’s outskirts, cattle wander slowly across main roads and geese, a local food, run freely in the streets. In the town centre, apartment blocks are under construction on street after street, and labourers can be found shovelling cement even on the day of an important national holiday.

But here and elsewhere in Turkey’s east and south, a low-intensity war has returned. Militants of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) — a terrorist group in the eyes of the European Union, Washington and the Turkish government — have blown up infrastructure, and assassinated dozens of police officers and soldiers in recent months.

In retaliation, the government says more than 2,400 suspected PKK members in the border regions and in northern Iraq have been killed. Meanwhile, dozens of Kurdish civilians have died in clashes between police and militants.

For their part, Kurdish rebels say the government is to blame for failures in security that allowed a series of bombings — thought to have been the work of sleeper cells of the Islamic State group — that killed dozens of Kurdish youth activists in Suruc in July and 102 peace marchers in Ankara three weeks ago.

Amid what increasingly resembles a return to the state of war that took 40,000 lives in the 1980s and ’90s, Turkey goes to the polls in parliamentary elections Sunday more divided than it has been for decades.

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The “new Turkey” envisioned by the moderate Islamist AK Party co-founded by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is coming apart at the seams. For European leaders hoping to stem the tide of refugees passing through the country from Syria and elsewhere, Turkey’s political instability is alarming.

For Ayhan Bilgen, the ghosts of the 1990s — when thousands of Kurds disappeared, thought to be murdered by state-sanctioned extrajudicial killings — still linger. As a journalist he saw first-hand how the authorities destroyed thousands of Kurdish villages in eastern Turkey and forcibly removed hundreds of families to other parts of the country.

Today, Bilgen is a parliamentary representative of the Kurdish-rooted Peoples’ Democratic Party or HDP in Kars. He is exhausted because his party’s decision not to hold election rallies for fear of further bombings forces him to take to the road to campaign. He has visited home after home, village after village.

“For five years my phone was tapped. (The authorities) accused me of belonging to a terrorist organization. Last summer I was called to the police station; if I didn’t have (parliamentary) immunity I would probably still be in prison today,” he said.

Analysts say the government’s recent besieging of predominantly Kurdish towns in the east is an attempt to tie the rise of the HDP — which won 80 parliamentary seats in June, destroying the AK Party’s majority in the process — to the broadly unpopular PKK ahead of Sunday’s election.

“The attacks on the (HDP) party offices as well as on Kurdish neighbourhoods in different towns are inextricably linked to Erdogan’s concerted post-election smear campaign against the party and its leader, Selahattin Demirtaş, accusing them of being terrorists,” wrote Human Rights Watch researcher Emma Sinclair-Webb in September.

Back in eastern Turkey, far from the modern subway lines and glimmering new bridges built by Erdogan’s AK Party in Istanbul and other major cities, the rural landscape is a political battleground.

The AK Party needs 278 parliamentary seats to regain its majority and the party’s election campaign has focused on provinces lost by small margins. The election before last the AK Party won 43 per cent of the popular vote in Kars. In June, it came second behind the HDP with just 26 per cent of the vote.

Kars province is highly agricultural. More cattle are bred here than anywhere else in Turkey and almost every family is involved in farming in some way. Erdogan — who is no longer a member of the AK Party he co-founded, though he is still widely seen as its single authority — strikes a chord with many of the region’s rural, conservative voters and those ill affected by the PKK’s seemingly random violence.

Many locals are fatigued by the checkpoints, explosions and general insecurity — familiar features of the 30-year war between the state and the PKK that appear to be returning. For some, the PKK are terrorists, cowards hiding in mountains and hills surrounding Kars and who occasionally resort to blowing up military targets and assassinating police by ambush. Several mountains around Kars, which are important skiing and trekking territory, are off limits to civilians. Locals say that highways between towns were too dangerous to pass after dark for weeks last month.

A walk through the streets of central Kars on a night when temperatures have already touched freezing suggests a divided electorate. A man in a confectionary questions why foreign journalists come to Kars. “Why not go to a different city, to Istanbul? You come here because you are supporting the Kurds?” he asked, angrily.

Twenty-six year-old homemaker Ela said she won’t be voting. “There are no good parties left. In the past I voted for the opposition because it was against the AK Party; now the opposition is going against Turkey’s interests,” she said.

For HDP candidate Bilgen, whose party’s election office was attacked by a mob of ultranationalists last May, events across the southern border in Syria are key.

“It looks like the Kurds in Syria are set for more victories,” he said. “So we have a choice. Turkey can either embrace fundamental changes; if not, we could see a war.”

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